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Talk: Helene Steiner – Conversations between the Natural and the Artificial

Helene Steiner is a UK based designer and researcher with a focus on new interactions in and with our (natural) environment. Her research follows a biological approach and looks at opportunities to not only bridge the physical and the digital world but also the natural and the artificial.

Her background is in Product Design with a degree from the Bauhaus University in Weimar. During her time in Vienna she studied under FROG founder Prof. Hartmut Esslinger to explore the opportunities of extending our bodies with technology and prosthetics, what lead to her MA and MSc in Innovation Design Engineering at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College in London. Currently she is a PostDoc Researcher in Human Experience Design at Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK.

“Mankind evolved on the ground of tools nature provided and started very early taking advantage of biological processes. Over time, nevertheless, humans had been distancing more and more from nature and disconnected from being part of it – instead we built our own artificial world.

New technologies put biology back into the spotlight and open up a lot of new opportunities to manipulate, design, understand, protect and interact with our natural environment. This raises the question, though, what is still natural and what artificial.

This talk is on the opportunities of a future where the natural and the artificial are connected and interact enabled by technology and driven by nature – and on how this combination of digital and natural processes leads to new applications and innovative products.”

Helene Steiner / Royal College of Arts / Microsoft Research
Conversations between the Natural and the Artificial